Read an Excerpt
A Democratic Constitution for Public Education
By Paul T. Hill, Ashley E. Jochim The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-20071-2
CHAPTER 1
Why Governance?
Why should a sensible person read a book about school governance? Many well-informed citizens frown upon proposals for performance accountability, charter schools, vouchers, and other governance changes, saying that students do not learn from laws and regulations, they learn from teachers. Just give every child a good teacher, and the problems of public schools will go away. They would be right, of course, if only it were possible to give every child a better teacher without changing the rules by which public schools are governed.
The prescription to give every child a good teacher is deceptively simple, akin to the advice offered by a fictional economist about how to slow inflation: Just pay people less and charge less for things in the stores. This is a sensible approach, if only someone had the power to make it happen directly, which no one does. Since the tools available to policy makers affect inflation only indirectly—and their use often has paradoxical effects, like price controls leading to supply reduction followed by even higher prices—the simple prescription does not work.
In much the same way, bypassing governance to focus only on the classroom ignores the complex forces that ultimately determine who teaches whom and what gets taught. Rules about teacher pay scales, certification, class sizes, local district hiring, and labor contract provisions on teacher assignment all affect who decides to teach, what preparation they have, and where they will be assigned to teach. Rules about curriculum, methods, use of time, and achievement testing affect what is taught. Like inflation, teacher quality, assignment, and performance result from a complex set of factors; anyone who wants to change the results must grapple with those factors. Those who claim these are irrelevant to school effectiveness can rightly be accused of saying, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."
If the performance of public schools is inherently wrapped up in the governing arrangements that oversee them, then improvement is only possible via a change in governance. That is the premise of this book. We consider how to design a governance system that protects children from abuse and taxpayers from fraud without putting a stranglehold on the people and institutions that need to make schools work. In the process, we explore the inherent tension between creating a system that satisfies its adult stakeholder groups that demand protection, deference, or special services on the one hand and providing the most effective schools possible on the other.
This tension between politics and performance is not unique to public education. But, unlike other publicly funded enterprises, it has not been explored to the same extent or depth, in part because reformers have been busy trying to take politics out of schools rather than considering how politics—of which governance is a part—can be managed, constrained, and transformed to serve public purposes.
The Inevitability of Governance
In K–12 public education, governance is the set of arrangements by which actors influence the operation of schools, by setting goals, defining desired outcomes, requiring that certain processes be followed, and forbidding (via penalties) certain behaviors. In the process, governance allocates competing values and purposes for public education, privileging some over others. The boundary between governance and provision of a public service like education is never razor sharp. The preferences and capacities of frontline workers like teachers define how services are delivered. But these preferences and capacities are not literally elements of governance unless they become codified in some way, for example, through laws, regulations, or provisions of contract.
Public education, like all publicly funded enterprises, must have governance. Expenditures of public funds always require some accounting and therefore some rules to protect taxpayers' financial interests. But the public interest in education extends beyond concerns about financial fraud or abuse. After all, compulsory school attendance is premised on the idea that not all parents would or could invest enough in their children's education to ensure full preparation for remunerative work and effective citizenship.
There is always the possibility of conflict, among the preferences of policy makers who define the purposes of public education, taxpayers who pay for it, parents who surrender their children to it, and educators who are paid to deliver it. These conflicts are inevitable and can never be fully resolved, but they can be managed in any time period through agreements about rules and processes for making decisions and managing services. These rules, processes, and methods of managing conflict are governance.
In the United States, educational governance consists of rules, goals, administrative processes, and prohibitions established by Congress, state legislatures, the local school board (either alone or via agreements with employee unions), courts, various regulatory agencies, and bureaucracies (e.g., the State Department of Education and local district central offices). These have grown more complex over time, encompassing more staff and a greater share of the resources used to provide public education.
Our Governance Arrangements Are Accidents of History
Bill Cosby. Suppose way back in history if you had a referee before every war, and the guy called the toss. Let's go to the Revolutionary War.
[Referee speaking.] British call heads. It's tails. What do you do, settlers? ... Settlers say that during the war they will wear any color clothes that they want to, shoot from behind the rocks and trees and everywhere. Says your team must wear red and march in a straight line.
Anyone who compares the freedoms enjoyed by U.S. private schools—and even by publicly supported schools in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia—has to ask whether U.S. public schools came out on the wrong side of a similar coin flip. Most other schools in the English-speaking world are less regulated, more adaptable, and more able to sustain themselves as coherent institutions than district-run schools in the United States.
Governance is inevitable, but particular governance arrangements are products of particular times, cultures, issues, and political events. No other country has a system as explicitly organized around different religions as does the Netherlands, which provides public subsidies to separate Catholic and Protestant school systems, all parts of a settlement of deep civil strife. No country standardizes the school day as much as France, whose education system was created by strong central government ministry.
No country has a more chaotic governance system than ours, for many reasons. In the early twentieth century, Progressive Era reformers sought to rationalize and centralize control of the system by empowering professional administration. They hoped to create more capable schools—better than the fragmented one-room schoolhouses that dotted the rural landscape and less political than the patronage-driven system that dominated urban centers. Thus emerged the local education agency (LEA). The core of an LEA was an elected school board with power to make most hiring, spending, and curriculum decisions and a bureaucracy largely staffed by professional educators. The LEA was insulated from normal local politics by off-cycle nonpartisan elections, held at times other than elections for national and state offices, in order to clip politicians' coattails.
The rationalized system of the 1920s gave way to a larger and politically fragmented system in the second half of the twentieth century. Laws to encourage and broaden the scope of collective bargaining among public sector employees, and to lift traditional bans on teacher strikes, greatly strengthened teachers unions. Perhaps ironically, given the ways in which centralized administration had long limited teachers' power and discretion, these efforts politically reinforced the centralized bureaucracy. Unions, unlike teachers, benefited from a system in which they negotiated with a centralized agency, and the history of unionization in the United States made teachers unions more like their industrial cousins than like the professional associations that dominated fields like medicine and law.
Social activists of the 1960s critiqued the centrally administered school system as unresponsive and unrepresentative of minorities, women, and the disabled and other special groups. Such pressures led to federal requirements for parent advisory councils, new protections for disabled children, and interventions by the federal Office for Civil Rights. Local school boards also created neighborhood councils, assistant superintendents, and special offices within the district, which acted as symbols of concern and were expected to navigate the sea of community complaints.
State education agencies, long disadvantaged by states' commitment to local control, entered the political fray to manage court orders to desegregate the schools. The 1980s and 1990s saw these agencies, as well as their overseers in state legislatures and governors' offices, become more aggressive in their efforts to target financial and academic mismanagement. Court cases that drove states to assume increasing shares of education spending encouraged state legislators to start controlling how the new money was spent. One consequence of this was greater prescriptiveness—in terms of staffing, instructional models, curriculum, and so on. Another was new forms of state intervention including charter schools, district and school takeovers, mayors acting as state agents to run schools, and, most recently, state-run districts.
In this system, private groups that want to influence schools, including neighborhood associations, parents of gifted and special education students, civil rights organizations, business associations, and professional societies, can forum shop. They can try to get what they want (e.g., new programs for language-minority students) mandated by any level of government including the local school board or by the courts; they can also seek funding via a new federal or state appropriation or via an unfunded mandate, which requires schools to do something new without any extra money. As Terry Moe has shown, temporary majorities control future actions by encoding them in rules and bureaucratic structures.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, as many large urban districts headed into academic and financial bankruptcy, the legitimacy of the board, union, and central office combination was seriously eroded. Reflecting the dissatisfaction with the status quo, the use of general government institutions like mayors is on the rise.
The Potential Harms of Governance
Governance of public education is inevitable, but it can produce results that no one wants. For example, our existing governance system creates many barriers to the desired result of providing effective instruction for every child:
State laws about teacher certification and licensing exclude many people who know important subjects and want to teach. In particular, scientists and mathematicians who did not take education school courses are excluded from teaching, while education school graduates, who often do not know those subjects well, are employed to teach them.
Children who are supposed to benefit from extra funding provided by federal programs still have less spent on them than others in the same districts owing to carefully placed loopholes in federal law.
Principals who want to buy better books or online instruction for students in their schools, or to extend the school day by hiring more teachers and fewer administrators, cannot do so because most resource decisions are made centrally.
Schools forced to deal with funding declines can be forced to let go of their best teachers, if more senior teachers elsewhere want their jobs.
Schools serving disproportionate numbers of low-income children in most big cities get less experienced teachers than other schools. This is caused by teacher collective bargaining agreements approved by local school boards.
These, and literally hundreds of other artifacts of governance, can weaken public education and deprive students of learning opportunities.
The Problems with Governance: Civic Mobilization and Unbounded Institutions
Governance matters. The problem with our current governance system stems in part from the failure to mobilize concerned interests on behalf of effective schools. As Clarence Stone and his colleagues have argued, education suffers from a lack of "civic capacity" because concerned interests are mobilized only episodically and even then, around different agendas.
But mass mobilization, even when achieved, is problematic in the absence of institutions that can realistically process competing demands, make trade-offs, and take coherent action. As the Consortium on Chicago School Research learned about the 1989 reforms that made every school accountable to elected neighborhood representatives, some schools improved but a nearly equal number became even more divided and less effective. Adults will mobilize, vote, attend meetings, and serve on committees "for the children," but when faced with concrete decisions, adults can learn that people think differently and value different things about schools. Mobilization does not sweep away politics or remove the need for governance to resolve competing claims and visions about schools.
Our current governance system suffers not simply from a mobilization problem but from an institutional one: Governance institutions meet demands, even competing ones, whenever possible, resulting in proliferation of new rules, mandates, and restrictions. Policies can oppose one another or make multiple claims on the same resources. The political logic has reinforced the institutional one.
Even proposals based on claimed links to school effectiveness—for example, that particular class sizes, teacher licensing schemes, seat time requirements, or administrative structures would lead to increased student learning—are processed as advocacy demands. Such policies are adopted one by one, even in the absence of evidence that they would work equally well in all schools or would be more effective than other possible actions costing the same amount. As described by Dominic Brewer and Joanna Smith, serial satisfaction of demands has led to a "crazy quilt" of policies and constraints.
Some governance constraints arise from perennial problems, for example, schools' tendency to underserve children with disabilities and to try to handpick the easiest to educate so they can look good. Rules to protect students against discrimination are unavoidable governance constraints for public schools stemming from a constitutional framework that guarantees equal protection under the law and equal opportunity to benefit from public services.
However, many of the conflicts that led to governance constraints are transitory, stemming from a temporary failure to achieve an objective. Issues arise and are resolved, but their resolutions are encoded in law, policy, or contract. The lack of a professionalized teaching force at the turn of the twentieth century, for example, led to initiatives to license teachers. These types of constraints stay in place even when the problems are no longer present (the norm of college degrees for teachers is now thoroughly established), the problem's characteristics have changed (the types of teachers we need are different), or the parties to conflicts that gave rise to them are no longer active. Teachers and principals consistently say that the rules, as well as the time used to respond to shifting state and district mandates, comply with demands for reports, and attend mandatory meetings, prevent them from doing their best for children.
Although in theory the different institutions and levels of government that collectively govern education have their own spheres of action, the boundaries among them are unclear. Any institution of government can impose a requirement, and it does not have to seek the concurrence of any other. Whether these arrangements are well intentioned or not, their multiplication undermines the efforts of those who work in public education.
This Book
How do we design public oversight that does not drive out school problem solving, adaptation to natural variations in students' needs and interests, and the freedom to innovate? This book starts from the assumption that governance can be constrained so as to check the political impulses that undermine the public purposes of K–12 education.
How to fix public education governance in the United States is not a new question. Analysts have suggested many alternative forms of governance, each intended to shift the locus of decision making from local school boards and state legislatures to other entities. Milton Friedman ushered in an era of governance reform thinking. He argued for putting parents in charge. John Chubb and Terry Moe suggested a more complex system, with parents in charge but also some roles for regulators, from whom school operators would need to get licenses. Others have suggested leaving a government-operated school system intact but putting different people—mayors, appointed boards, or state officials—in charge. Still others have proposed creating new institutions to counterbalance old ones—for example, widespread adoption of Louisiana's statewide "recovery school district" that can seize control of consistently low-performing schools from school districts.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Democratic Constitution for Public Education by Paul T. Hill, Ashley E. Jochim. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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